Studios testing more simultaneous DVD, on-demand releases

A handful of movie studios are releasing popular movies this year on both DVD …

The window between DVD release and video on demand (VOD) availability continues to close, this time thanks to efforts from Universal Studios Home Entertainment, Summit Entertainment, and 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment. These studios are slowly but surely gaining more confidence that VOD rentals and sales are a good thing, though some are more willing than others to put everything out there.

From Universal, both the Oscar-nominated Changeling and Flash of Genius will be available on the iTunes Store as well as cable VOD services at the same time as the DVD release on February 17. Similarly, Fox plans to release Bottle Shock, The Secret Life of Bees, and Choke on VOD and DVD simultaneously this month, and The Happening in October.

Summit is also joining in on the simultaneous release fun with Twilight in March, though this won't be the first time the studio has done so. In fact, Summit has released all of its films simultaneously on DVD and VOD. "We’ve done it from the beginning, because we had seen results from various tests that said that releasing it on VOD did not negatively affect DVD purchases and in some cases might have positively affected it," Summit Home Entertainment President Steve Nickerson told Video Business.

Universal, which isn't quite so gung-ho about DVD/VOD releases as Summit, appears to be more comfortable taking baby steps. A Universal spokesperson told Video Business the studio is considering simultaneous releases by choosing films it believes will do better on rentals than sell-throughs on a title-by-title basis. It won't be surprising, however, to see Universal eventually start releasing most of its movies this way, especially if Summit's reasoning proves true for the larger studios.

The entertainment world's slow evolution towards putting DVD and VOD releases on equal footing has been a long time coming, though it makes perfect sense; people who are going to buy a film on DVD are going to do so whether it's available on VOD or not, and VOD buyers/renters are typically not interested in buying a DVD (and if they are, they fall into the first category). The obvious next step is for simultaneous theatrical releases, which has seen very little in the way of experimentation thus far.

In 2006, for example, a film by Oscar-winner Steven Soderbergh called Bubble was released on 215 art-house screens as well as cable channel HDNet on the same day, and DVD release just days after. At that time, however, major movie chains (such as AMC and Cinemark) said they had no interest in carrying a film that could undercut their own business: "We feel that day and date (for a DVD release) dilutes the theatrical release," a Cinemark spokeswoman said of Bubble. "This wouldn't be something we would show."

It was clear that major movie chains were (and still are) going to fight such simultaneous releases tooth and nail, so we'll have to content ourselves with concurrent DVD/VOD releases for the time being.